‘Forgotten’ Black cemetery found at Air Force base
Officials at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, say they have confirmed the location of a lost former Black cemetery on the grounds of the base, and identified 121 potential grave sites, capping three years of archaeological surveys and building on earlier findings.
“We’re ready to say this is Port Tampa Cemetery,” Senior Master Sgt. Terry Montrose, a base spokesperson, said Sunday.
Between the 1840s and 1920s, dozens of individuals, mostly Black, were buried in unmarked graves at the Port Tampa Cemetery in Tampa, he said. The Air Force base was built at the site between 1939 and 1941.
The base started searching for grave sites in 2019 after historians at the Tampa Bay History Center alerted officials that there might be a former Black cemetery on land now occupied by the base, Montrose said.
Using ground-penetrating radar and cadaver dogs, searchers found 11 possible unmarked graves between 2019 and 2021. That wasn’t enough to conclusively say they had found a cemetery as the graves were spread sporadically, Montrose said.
“But there were enough bodies that we thought we should memorialize it,” he added.
The cemetery was discovered on a grassy area near a flight line on the base. The base held a memorial service in February 2021 and dedicated a plaque to those buried there.
“This cemetery was erased; this cemetery was forgotten; this land was taken from them,” Yvette Lewis, the president of the Hillsborough County branch of the NAACP, said at the time, of those buried there. “Their loved ones laid them down so they could rest their souls, not to be trampled over, covered up, walked on.”
A Hillsborough County judge, Lisa Campbell, whose grandparent’s firstborn child was buried at the site, told attendees, “We all are going to have to grapple with how and why things like this happen. Anyone from any culture expects you would be able to come see your loved ones if you wanted, to come sit and solemnly remember them; in this case that didn’t happen,” she said.
Base officials continued searching, and between 2021 and 2023 discovered another 110 possible or probable graves, Montrose said.
The findings led officials to confirm that the site was the Port Tampa Cemetery, he said, because the graves were grouped tightly together in a 1-acre area, “so we know it’s an area that was purposely created to bury bodies.”
A historical marker at the base describes Port Tampa Cemetery as a burial ground used by residents who did not have the means to establish formal cemeteries.
“It was one of several African American cemeteries in the area that had been forgotten or purchased for redevelopment,” the marker reads.
In recent years, several of these cemeteries have been rediscovered in Tampa. In 2019, at the edge of the C. Leon King High School campus, school officials identified what they believed to be Ridgewood Cemetery, where mostly African Americans were buried in the 1940s and 1950s.